Cicero's poetry generally. But little of it remains to us, and by that
little it has been admitted that he has not achieved the name of a
great poet; but what he did was too great in extent and too good in
its nature to be passed over altogether without notice. It has been
his fate to be rather ridiculed than read as a maker of verses, and
that ridicule has come from two lines which I have already quoted. The
longest piece which we have is from the Phaenomena of Aratus, which he
translated from the Greek when he was eighteen years old, and which
describes the heavenly bodies. It is known to us best by the extracts
from it given by the author himself in his treatise, De Natura Deorum.
It must be owned that it is not pleasant reading. But translated
poetry seldom is pleasant, and could hardly be made so on such a
subject by a boy of eighteen. The Marius was written two years after
this, and we have a passage from it, quoted by the author in his De
Divinatione, containing some fine lines. It tells the story of the
battle of the eagle and the serpent. Cicero took it, no doubt (not
translated it, however), from the passage in the Iliad, lib, xii,
200, which has been rendered by Pope with less than his usual fire,
and by Lord Derby with no peculiar charm. Virgil has reproduced the
picture with his own peculiar grace of words. His version has been
translated by Dryden, but better, perhaps, by Christopher Pitt.
Voltaire has translated Cicero's lines with great power, and Shelley
has reproduced the same idea at much greater length in the first canto
of the Revolt of Islam, taking it probably from Cicero, but, if not,
from Voltaire.[39] I venture to think that, of the nine versions,
Cicero's is the best, and that it is the most melodious piece of Latin
poetry we have up to that date. Twenty-seven years afterward, when
Lucretius was probably at work on his great poem, Cicero wrote an
account of his consulship in verse. Of this we have fifty or sixty
lines, in which the author describes the heavenly warnings which were